Kofi's UN for scandal

Jack Kelly:

After prodding from the United States, the U.N. Security Council voted in August to send peacekeepers to Darfur, the region in western Sudan where Islamist Arab militias have slaughtered some 400,000 people.

The peacekeepers have not yet been sent because the government of Sudan, which sponsors the Janjaweed militias, objects. In the unlikely event U.N. peacekeepers ever arrive, the refugees had better hide their women.

Several Rwandan women told a commission investigating the 1994 Rwanda genocide that French soldiers raped them when they sought refuge at U.N. bases. The soldiers were part of a peacekeeping force which also did not intervene as Hutu militias massacred Tutsis. Some 800,000 people were killed.

"The French used to come to our refugee tents and take girls, including myself," a Tutsi woman told an investigating commission in Rwanda Tuesday. "They would forcefully start to have sexual intercourse with us, many French soldiers at the same time."

A 1999 report commissioned by the United Nations found that the organization had failed Rwanda by ignoring evidence that genocide was planned, by refusing to act once it was under way and then by abandoning the Rwandan people when they most needed protection.

The U.N. official in charge of peacekeeping at the time was Kofi Annan. He ordered U.N. troops not to interfere, and then to withdraw. When the 1999 report came out, Mr. Annan, now the outgoing U.N. secretary general, promised "never again." But "never again" already had happened.

Roughly 250,000 people were killed in the Bosnian civil war. There were U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia for most of that time, but they did little to prevent the ethnic cleansing. The ugliest incident occurred at Srebrenica in July 1995, when Serb militiamen took 7,500 Muslim men and boys from a U.N. designated "safe zone" and shot them, as U.N. peacekeepers watched.

In another 1999 report, the United Nations said it failed to save thousands of Bosnian Muslims from Serb mass murder because of "an inability to recognize the scope of the evil confronting us."

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Multilateralism has been an abject failure at preventing genocide or nuclear proliferation. Kofi Annan's legacy is that he led the UN in most of those failures over the last 10 years including the largest corruption scandal in the history of the world--oil for food. The first step to recovery is to admit their is a problem. The multilateralist are not there yet.